Editorial

Just a few years after Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal published its inaugural issue, literary critic Stanley Fish lamented the rise of interdisciplinarity in the academy. According to Fish (1989), interdisciplinary inquiries are not merely difficult, but impossible, because they fail to “liberate us from the narrow confines of academic ghettos,” instead “redomicil[ing] us in enclosures that do not advertise themselves as such” (p. 18). Fish is surely right that scholars, interdisciplinary or otherwise, must sometimes choose a port of call, but wrong to imply that every port is constructed in much the same way. Although some fields define themselves principally by the epistemological orientation(s) of their members, others cohere entirely around their subject matter. Such is the case with music perception and cognition, which now harbors a thriving research community consisting of numerous scholarly societies, academic journals, and research centers, but one whose members nonetheless hail from many different disciplines. The interdisciplinary mandate reflected in Music Perception’s subtitle is thus so difficult to achieve because it requires participation from editors, reviewers, and authors who are unified not by their specialist expertise, but by their desire to communicate across disciplines.

It is for this reason that I would like to thank the many wonderful people who have contributed to this journal over the past four decades. First and foremost, the readers of Music Perception owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to its outgoing editor, Catherine (Kate) J. Stevens. During her tenure, Music Perception published seven volumes, 35 issues, and nearly 200 articles, thanks in no small part to Professor Stevens’ intellectual and organizational acumen, all while maintaining a steadfast commitment to the journal’s “prescient” subtitle (Stevens, 2017). The journal’s interdisciplinary ambitions also would not be possible if not for the diverse specialist expertise of the boards of Associate Editors and Consulting Editors, both past and present. Professor Stevens, together with Editorial Assistant Karen Hutchings and the University of California Press (UCP) team, also dramatically increased the journal’s visibility over the past few years using the journal website, UCP blog, and social media, the results of which will continue to bear fruit in the years to come. Finally, Music Perception maintains such high publication standards and an unrelenting publication schedule thanks largely to Managing Editor Christine Koh’s efforts. On behalf of the journal’s readers and authors, thanks to everyone involved.

I am deeply honored to serve as editor of Music Perception, a journal I have long admired, and to count myself among a cohort of former editors—Diana Deutsch, Jamshed J. Bharucha, Robert Gjerdingen, Lola L. Cuddy, and Catherine J. Stevens—who have had such a profound influence on my work. Among their many research contributions, such topics as grouping mechanisms (e.g., Deutsch, 2013), harmonic priming (e.g., Bharucha & Stoeckig, 1986), voice-leading schemata (e.g., Gjerdingen, 1988), melodic closure (e.g., Cuddy et al., 1981), and music/dance expectations (e.g., Stevens et al., 2010) have all directly informed my own research interests at one time or another.

I completed a PhD in music theory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Institute of Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. In 2017, I joined Texas Tech University as an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, where I established the Performing Arts Research Laboratory (PeARL) together with Dr. Peter Martens. Much of my previous research examines the structural parallels between music and language using behavioral, psychophysiological, and computational methods, with particular emphasis on the many topics associated with pitch structure, including scale theory, tonality, harmony, cadence, and musical form. I also have ancillary interests in music on the global radio, music and emotion, and cross-cultural music research. My background is thus interdisciplinary, having completed degrees in music theory while working in research labs specializing in music perception and cognition and music information retrieval. I now serve as Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Co-Director of the PeARL at Texas Tech University.

Given my own background, I have always been drawn to the ambitious research projects reflected in Music Perception’s pages, which address fundamental questions about the composition, performance, and reception of music using theoretical, experimental, and computational methods from a range of disciplines, including psychology, cognitive neuroscience, acoustics, music theory, music information retrieval, (ethno)musicology, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. In the years to come, Music Perception will continue to publish rigorous accounts of music perception and cognition through multi-experiment studies (including replication), critical reviews, theory-driven applied research, cross-cultural research, computational modeling and corpus research, and multimodal perception. Authors will also be encouraged to adopt open-science research practices such as pre-registering experiments on the open-science framework (osf.io) and sharing materials, code, and de-identified data using open-access online repositories.

To streamline the submission process, Music Perception has migrated to the web-based Scholastica platform (https://musicperception.scholasticahq.com/), which tracks and organizes all files and correspondence. In collaboration with UCP, we will also continue to maintain the journal’s social media presence in order to ensure the highest possible visibility for each published article. I encourage guest editors to contact me with ideas for special issues that explore recent trends, journal policy, or hot topics.

Along with the journal’s Associate Editors and Consulting Editors, I look forward to serving the journal and the music perception and cognition community more generally. Forthcoming issues consist of papers accepted during Professor Stevens’ editorship. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any ideas for Music Perception going forward at [email protected].